The world has been changing literally before our eyes. The pandemic, which represented the opening salvo to our entrance into the fourth Industrial Revolution, triggered a wave of disruptive transformation, of which we are only scratching the surface. The integration of newly instrumented physical, biological and digital worlds has given rise to an unprecedented number of'big bang disruptions,' the breadth and depth of which will herald the transformation of entire systems, creating and destroying product lines, markets and ecosystems. We are also entering the third wave of artificial intelligence (AI). In this era, we imbue human perception capabilities onto virtual assistants that deliver personalized experiences spanning multiple worlds.

ChatGPT is already causing problems. The text generator from Open AI is imperfect at creating factually accurate or interesting writing, but it can create relatively appropriate text for just about any prompt in no time at all. And even with a bevy of built-in filters, that can be pretty dangerous as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people have already found uses for the tool that are less than ideal. Anything that can create content out of whole cloth can likely create something dangerous.

Russian cyber-criminals have been observed on dark web forums trying to bypass OpenAI's API restrictions to gain access to the ChatGPT chatbot for nefarious purposes. Various individuals have been observed, for instance, discussing how to use stolen payment cards to pay for upgraded users on OpenAI (thus circumventing the limitations of free accounts). Others have created blog posts on how to bypass the geo controls of OpenAI, and others still have created tutorials explaining how to use semi-legal online SMS services to register to ChatGPT. "Generally, there are a lot of tutorials in Russian semi-legal online SMS services on how to use it to register to ChatGPT, and we have examples that it is already being used," wrote Check Point Research (CPR), which shared the findings with Infosecurity ahead of publication. "It is not extremely difficult to bypass OpenAI's restricting measures for specific countries to access ChatGPT," said Sergey Shykevich, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point Software Technologies.